WinFS back in the running?

Many people dismissed the promised next generation Windows Filing System when it was announced in August last year that the feature would not be included in Windows Vista as previously suggested. But it seems that WinFS is very much back on the agenda, and we can expect to hear from Microsoft about it in the near future.

The Beta1 build of WinFS has been prepared, and there are four sessions about the software technology scheduled for the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference to be held in Los Angeles during September.

According to Microsoft Watch, sources inside Microsoft report that plans have been resumed to release versions of WinFS for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, as well as the promised version for Windows Vista which will be made available sometime after the initial release of that upcoming version of the OS.

Actually, beta 1 of the WinFS file systems was released/announced just today. If you hav an MSDN subscription, it is available for download on he subscriber download page.

And yes, I did read today that they intend to at least have it as an add-on for Vista Server about 2007. I think they also mentioned earlier O/S's, but for the life of me, I can not find that article I read not more than 6 hours ago! But personally I wouldn't count on a feature requiring such a fundamental change to the infrastructure being available for 2003 or XP.

Man I need better indexing - then mayb I could find my articles AFTER I read them :-p

The fact is they are still at least initially releasing Vista without WinFS. This will mean that Vista really won't have any major new technologies besides interface changes. It really makes me wonder what the fuck they have been working on for 5 years.

It also seems that WinFS won't really be any better than ext3, which has existed for years. Microsoft spends so much time talking about innovation, that they forget to actually innovate. Microsoft is always saying opensource is bad for innovation, but ext3 is opensource.

I've tried Windows Vista and I am not very impressed. It is a bit prittier than Windows XP, and I really like tabbed browsing in IE (something Opera and opensource Mozilla have had for some time), but that's about all I notice, besides many of my programs not working. I realize it is beta, so I can't really make any final judgement, but I hope Microsoft cleans it up alot by the time it goes gold.